A Polish wedding playlist, and how to build it with your guests

A Polish wedding playlist, and how to build it with your guests

Music is the part of a wedding that people remember and nobody can fully plan. A good playlist fills the floor. A bad one empties it in twenty minutes, and no amount of money spent elsewhere makes up for that.

Worth saying up front: the music at a wedding in Poland is mostly Polish. That is not a limitation to work around, it is the point. Trying to run a Polish reception on an international playlist is the surest way to have a room full of people standing politely at the edge of the floor.

How the night is actually shaped

A Polish reception runs longer than most, and the music has to carry it. The rough shape:

Ceremony and dinner. Instrumental, acoustic or jazz, kept underneath the conversation.

The first dance. Your song. The only one on the entire list that has to be certain.

Warming up, roughly 19:00 to 21:00. Songs everyone in the room can sing along to. This is where the Polish classics do the heavy lifting, because they are the ones three generations know.

The floor at full tilt, 21:00 to 03:00. Where guest suggestions belong. Also, at most weddings, where disco polo appears, and where you find out that the relatives you least expected are the ones who requested it.

Oczepiny. The set of games and traditions around midnight, when the bride's veil comes off. Your band or DJ will have their own repertoire for this and it is usually best to let them run it.

The last hour. Slower, sentimental, winding down rather than stopping dead.

The songs that turn up at nearly every Polish wedding

Not a definitive list, and deliberately short. These are the ones that reliably get people up:

• ·Maryla Rodowicz - the songs your guests' parents danced to and your guests know anyway
• ·Kwiat Jabłoni - the current default for couples wanting something gentler
• ·Dawid Podsiadło - reliably fills the floor across a wide age range
• ·Czesław Niemen - for the slower, more serious moment in the evening
• ·Happysad - the guitar-band end of the room

For a first dance, the international standards still dominate: Ed Sheeran's "Perfect", John Legend's "All of Me", Etta James' "At Last". There is no prize for being original here. Pick the one you can dance to without counting.

Two countries in one room

If some of your guests do not speak Polish, the playlist has a job the rest of the wedding does not: it has to include them without turning the evening into something neither side recognises.

What works, from the weddings we have seen:

• ·Keep the Polish core intact. Do not dilute it to be polite. Guests from abroad have come to a Polish wedding and generally want it to be one.
• ·Anchor the international guests early. A run of widely known English-language tracks in the first hour of dancing, while people are still finding their confidence, does more than scattering them through the night.
• ·Warn people what oczepiny is. Not musically, just so nobody is startled when the lights change and everyone forms a circle. A line on your wedding website does this before the day.
• ·Ask the band directly. Most bands and DJs in Poland have done bilingual weddings and have a working plan for it. It is a much better conversation to have in advance than at 22:00.

Letting guests suggest songs

The couple cannot know what a hundred and fifty people want to hear. The guests do.

Every one of our themes includes a song request section. A guest types a title and artist, adds a note if they want to, and it comes straight to you by email. You end up with a list that reflects the actual room, and you hand that list to the band.

Three reasons it is worth doing:

• ·Range. Your grandmother adds Maryla Rodowicz, a colleague adds something current, an uncle adds disco polo. All three are correct.
• ·Involvement. Guests who suggested a song turn up on the floor when it plays.
• ·Advance warning. You also learn what people want, which means you learn what to leave off. You are allowed to say no.

One practical note: collect the suggestions early, not in the final fortnight. Bands need time to learn anything they do not already play, and you need time to spot the requests you would rather quietly lose.

Handing it over

Whoever is playing, give them the list well before the day, with the first dance marked clearly and anything you specifically do not want written down as well. A band that knows what to avoid is worth as much as one that knows what to play.

Have a look at our themes to see how the song request section works, or read our guide to the paperwork if the wedding itself is still at the formalities stage.